Lucky 70s

IPOs and hackers top Spencer's tip list this week.

The retro Ragamuffin was grooving to an Engelbert Humperdinck CD and sipping a bottle of Mateus as he checked e-mail from his pad. A missive from a Tabby tattler claimed theres a reason that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has been uncharacteristically quiet lately about his highflying companys IPO prospects. The tipster heard from sources that the hosted CRM provider will go public in the first quarter and has already hired Morgan Stanley to handle the IPO. If all goes according to plan, the offering would value Salesforce.com at $1 billion. Gagging at the projected price, Spence adjusted his "WIN" button, causing him to accidentally drop a morsel of beef into his fondue pot.
As the Kitty poked in the pot in search of his snack, he pondered how easily things, like a decade, can be lost or, in the case of Nokias N-Gage cell phone games, stolen. Indeed, hackers have recently boasted online that theyve cracked the encryption for the games. Nokia now faces the possibility of pirated games popping up all over the Web that can be played on any phone or handheld running Symbian OS.

Spence banged his head on a macramé plant holder as he bolted across the room to answer the phone. It was a pal of the Puss, who claimed that when EMC bought Documentum last month, it beat storage rival IBM to the punch. According to Armonk insiders, Big Blue had also been in the running for Documentum, said the friend of the Furball. Currently, Open Text and FileNet also seem likely takeover targets as storage merges with enterprise content management into the more generic milieu of data management. Although FileNet Chairman and CEO Lee Roberts publicly dismissed rumors that his company was in acquisition talks with anyone, the Katt crony noted that Roberts also acknowledged the "pretty nice premium" EMC paid for Documentum and alluded to the fact that his company would be open to such sweetened offers. "Mmm, sounds like a girl I once dated," mused the Mouser, as the memory made his mood ring darken.

Any tryst with the fair sex can be a gamble, thought the pithy Puss, as he saw that Harrahs Entertainment is about to place its chips on women as a target audience for its online gambling ambitions. Hoping to skirt U.S. laws on Internet gambling, Harrahs is proposing a subscription gambling site called Lucky Me, aimed at women. Lulled by soothing pastel colors, rather than a gaudy Vegas Strip look, gaming gals can gamble away only the amount of a prepaid monthly fee. "It might be a clever workaround for the current legislation, but that tacky casino decor is a big part of the psychological allure for bettors, no?" thought the Kitty as he tacked an old black-light zodiac poster to his wall. "Sometimes theres no accounting for peoples tastes," laughed the Lynx.
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